Am I the only one who would prefer a side by side mode where I can compare before/after writing and individually accept/reject Writing Tool modifications?
Does anybody here know a simple macOS text editor that would allow use of Writing Tools in such a way?
have a look at iA Writer, I don’t think it qualifies as a ‘simple’ text editor and is not cheap but maybe it is suitable.
I use an older and simpler version for .txt files so can’t say how good this version is.
That approach Simon makes a lot of sense, building on the existing track changes approach, accepting or rejecting edits. Surprised Apple didn’t approach it in Pages that way.
I have experimented with a AI prompt to do something like that. This is my current prompt.
Correct all grammar and spelling mistakes in the following sentences. Do not change the word order or rewrite the structure. Only fix errors. Do not rephrase. Return the corrected sentence only.
Separately, in paragraphs below, act as a critical Professor of Creative Writing and suggest changes sentence by sentence. Show both my and your version in complete sentences with numbers. Ask me which number to rewrite following your suggestion.
This is the text to correct:
I use TextExpander to paste this, plus anything that is in the clipboard, into the AI web interface. TextExpander includes a keyboard macro that retrieves the clipboard contents.
Since English is not my native language, I would appreciate feedback or improvements. Any AI will work, but turn off search.
Are you talking about the Writing Tools interface in Notes, for instance, or the generic one that appears in most apps? The latter is entirely worthless, but the former seems like it does what you want.
I wrote about all this in detail in
Notes at least has a nice revert button so you can repeatedly go back and forth to see what got changed. But if you want to accept some changes while rejecting others it becomes a pain.
I can copy paste the text first and only let Writing Tools modify one copy. By comparing the two I see what it changed and how. Then by hand I incorporate some changes I like into the unmodified until I’m done. But this is tedious. There’s got to be a better way to do this. It bothers me that Apple doesn’t offer something similar to the regular spelling/grammar check where you always see what it wants to change and with what, you can also reject/accept on an individual basis. Writing Tools’ all or nothing doesn’t work well for me.
If you are comfortable using the Emacs editor, the ediff facility (a front-end to the Unix-standard diff/patch utilities) may make life easier. You can load two blocks of text (e.g. the original and modified copy) into two buffers and then ediff them.
You will then be able to step through each difference individually. Within each difference-block it will show you specifically the words within that block that are different. You can then choose to copy the block from one buffer to the other. Or you can manually type changes and then re-run the difference if you decide that the desired result is something between the two.
I use this all the time when comparing two text files (usually as a part of merging changes from third parties into a master document that has changed since the baseline that the third party was reviewing).
Like all things Emacs, there’s a learning curve, especially if you don’t normally use Emacs as your text editor, but I find that it works very well.
The way I do it works quite well. I use BBEdit as you need a text editor that offers a DIFF feature. I created a few Keyboard Maestro macros to help automate the process. (Unfortunately, I could not get KM to interact with the Writing Tools floating window – KM can’t see any of its buttons and it moves around so it’s in a different place every time and I couldn’t automate it at all.)
The first macro I have simply selects all the text in my document and selects Proofread from the Writing Tools menu. Then I have to manually click the Copy button once the AI has finished proofreading my document. I then have another macro that creates a new blank document, pastes in the clipboard contents, and chooses BBEdit’s Compare Two Front Documents command. This opens BBEdit’s difference tool, which highlights all the differences between the two documents. It’s really nice and easy to use.
It shows a list of changes and when you select one of those, it highlights the two paragraphs (original and corrected) and you can see what changes were made. If I agree with the changes I press a button that copies the changes to the original document. If I disagree, I copy the changes the other way (changing the corrected version). If I partially agree, I can edit the corrected copy to remove certain changes I disagree with.
I then press BBEdit’s “refresh differences” button which updates the list of differences. (This ensures I confirm all corrections and don’t skip any.) Then I press the down arrow key to go to the next difference found and check out that suggested correction.
When I’m all done I throw away the corrected document (close the window without saving) and save my newly-edited original with all the approved corrections.
I’ve been doing this for a few months and it’s really pretty nice. Much easier than sending text to ChatGPT or something else. Apple’s proofreading isn’t too bad. Not perfect, and it occasionally makes some strange suggestions. (The most annoying is when I use this for fiction and I have a character talking with slang, Apple will try and correct my abbreviations and teen jargon. Grr.)
There is no way to tweak the settings for proofreading – there’s no way to set a mode for fiction or technical writing, for instance. But overall I’d say I accept about 90% of its suggestions and it is really useful. I have a bad habit of leaving out words (I can’t type as fast as I think) and I miss them when I proofread (my brain sees them even when they aren’t there) and Apple’s Proofread finds those, which is awesome.
Another problem is it seems to not work sometimes (generic error about not being able to use Writing Tools). This seems to be related to text length, but I have found no rhyme or reason. I’ll send it a shorter bit of text and it will work fine. Other times it does a section of text 3x longer with no problem. I can only think it’s some memory limit related to the quantity of corrections, but I haven’t been able to verify that. It seems almost random.
One thing I do like is that it’s private. It does the proofreading locally on your machine and doesn’t send your text to the cloud, which is not only faster, but private. You don’t have to worry that your text might be used for training. (I worry that OpenAI claims it’s not using text for training, but who knows if they’re telling the truth?)
Anyway, you can do this without the macros, but it is a few more manual steps. The key, though, is to use BBEdit’s document comparison tool to verify and approve all the potential corrections.